„Wine and women and wonderful vices…”–An unusual banquet scene on a late archaic black-figure kylix in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

In the late Archaic and early Classical periods, Athenian pottery workshops produced vases of relatively low artistic quality, often decorated with repetitive scenes. Despite this, such vessels were widely exported throughout the Mediterranean and beyond—even at a time when higher-quality red-figure pottery was also available on the market. While scholarship has long regarded these hastily painted vases as the work of second-rate artists, recent studies have begun to reevaluate their significance. In this paper, we present a black-figure kylix attributed to the Leafless Group, one of the vase-painting groups that continued to decorate cups in black-figure technique after 500 BC, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Through a close examination of the pair of banqueters depicted on either side of the vessel, we aim to explore potential connections between the Leafless Group and other contemporary Athenian vase-painting workshops. We argue that the painters of these vessels were not merely unskilled imitators of higher-quality artists, but rather craftsmen responding to specific market demands.